


[podfic+fic] The Gabriel Reyes Protection Squad

by Annapods, Annaswrite (Annapods)



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: 5+1 Things, Audio Format: MP3, Audio Format: Streaming, Aural not!fic, Fix-It, Gen, Notfic, Podfic, Podfic Length: 10-20 Minutes, Reaperbeans, Very little dialogue, and is now somewhere between the fourth and the fifth because of the second, as in it started as the third turned into the sixth got written as the first, podnotfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-23
Updated: 2018-05-23
Packaged: 2019-05-09 17:11:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,977
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14720228
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Annapods/pseuds/Annapods, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Annapods/pseuds/Annaswrite
Summary: It's the reaperbeans. It's always the reaperbeans.Or, five times a member of OW/BW encountered the Gabriel Reyes Protection Squad and the one time Gabriel finally met them.





	[podfic+fic] The Gabriel Reyes Protection Squad

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [The One You Feed[Podfic]](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11237508) by [Arioch](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arioch/pseuds/Arioch). 



> Reaperbeans are so common in fanart, but weirdly rare in fanfic? Gimme moooore...  
> Credits to that one podfic by Arioch with the “die die die die” “Jack!” voice, adORBS, 10/10 recommend.

 

 **Streaming:**[tumblr](http://annapods.tumblr.com/tagged/tgrps) \- [dropbox](https://www.dropbox.com/s/wzzqt911skuj2ww/%5BOW%5D%20The%20Gabriel%20Reyes%20Protection%20Squad.mp3?dl=0)

 **Download:** dropbox ([mp3](https://www.dropbox.com/s/wzzqt911skuj2ww/%5BOW%5D%20The%20Gabriel%20Reyes%20Protection%20Squad.mp3?dl=0))

 

 **Contact me:**[twitter](https://twitter.com/iamapodperson) \- [tumblr](http://annapods.tumblr.com/) \- [dreamwidth](https://annapods.dreamwidth.org/) \- email (annabelle.myrt@gmail.com)

 **Notes:** this was first brainstormed on my phone over several car trip stops, [here in very bad German](https://www.dropbox.com/s/59zn4ndrpdk7z3t/%5BOW%5D%20reaperbeans%20AU%20brainstorming%20%28de%29.mp3?dl=0) and [here in English but what the heck was the app/I doing](https://www.dropbox.com/s/6i8rd7h6ga3yfrf/%5BOW%5D%20reaperbeans%20AU%20brainstorming%20%28en%29.mp3?dl=0). I’m putting it up for posterity, but listen at your own risks.

 

 

The first reaperbean appears during the reaperification process, in Moira’s lab, or Blackwatch’s med bay, or wherever [that one pic](http://overwatch.wikia.com/wiki/File:MoiraAndReyesExperiment.jpg) was. In the canon timeline, it appears while Moira is looking in Gabriel’s direction. She catches it, correctly analyzes the problem (too much nanobot production, leading to excesses that get shed like hairballs) and takes care of it and that’s it. In this AU, she’s looking the other way. She doesn’t notices the little ball of smoke fall to the ground and roll under her desk. Now, the reaperbeans are extensions of Gabriel. They aren’t as smart or self-aware as him, but they retain some of his ideas. Most of all, they still have his emotions. In that pic, Gabriel does not look happy. So the bean is not happy. The bean wants Moira to stop. The bean, the little shit, jumps up onto the desk and knocks some of her (very delicate) equipment over. Moira has to stop the experiment to do damage control. Bean: 1, Moira: 0.  
Now, Gabriel does not know about the bean. He was pretty out of it when it happened. When Moira comes to him complaining of someone messing with her equipment and stealing her notes, he can’t do anything except give her access to the security cameras footage and the entrance logs and promise her to look into it. Of course, the cameras mysteriously black during the incidents. As if someone had sprayed paint or soot on the lenses, except that’s ridiculous. There was nobody there. The door never even opened.  
The bean becomes the beanS. They’re like tribbles, that way. Only a few days later, there are already half a dozen of them. Some of them stay in the lab and mess with Moira, who is becoming more and more frazzled and paranoid. A few weeks of this, and, thinking that she’s been made for her more illegal research projects, or that Blackwatch is not safe for her research, she decides to cut her loses and pack her things and go. A bit abruptly, and a bit messily. It throws wrenches in quite a few plans, both official and illegal.

Though, before that, when parts of the beans squad is busy sabotaging Moira, the rest of them is following Gabriel around. Sneakily, of course. Or, they try. They’re just not very good at it. He keeps hearing strange, high-pitched voices behind him and seeing dark shapes out of the corner of his eyes.  
And then, the death threats start. Well, the beans think they’re gifts. But Gabriel nearly broke a tooth the other day on a bullet some asshole snuck into his meal, those are definitely death threats. Remember, the beans are smart, but not that smart. They follow him around and see him take care of his weapons, restore on ammo, train at the range, and they think: what can we do to help him? Give him more shiny things! Mostly bullets, because that’s easy to get and easier to transport, but also coins, needles, even scissors, once. Except they don’t really distinguish between the different types of shiny. They just grab what they can. Which means a lot of sneaking around the range to snag used shells. And who also spends a lot of time at the range? Ana.  
Ana starts seeing the same little dark shapes Gabriel sees out of the corner of his eyes. And one day, she sees some kind of little rodent running away with one of her spent shells. So she tries to catch them at it again. She tries to lure them out with food (they don’t care much for it) and then bullets and dimes (that, they do). A few of them start following her around, until they’re riding in her pockets and hoods (does she wear a hijab? If yes, then they definitely nestle at the back of her neck and squeakily mutter “Ananananana” into her ears. They purr, when they sleep. It’s the cutest thing ever).  
She’s curious, of course she is. But she also doesn’t really want to bring them to R&D. After all, they aren’t harming anyone, and actually, they’re pretty useful. Why, one time, they even warned her about this enemy sniper she’d missed. Though she does broach the subject with Jack, once. Just a throwaway comment, and his puzzled expression tells her all she needs to know on the subject.

The beans take their job as self-appointed protectors of Gabriel Reyes very seriously. They follow him around the base, they watch him when he sleeps, and they shadow him on missions. They notice who is hostile toward him and who helps him, and then they start to follow them around, too. Not as closely as Ana, of course. She’s an exception, so far. But they keep tabs. They take notes. And they act. The day some suspicious agent tries to sabotage one of Reyes’ missions, they sabotage him right back. Gabriel comes back, the agent doesn’t. The day a talon agent slips into the mission’s camp, they pile up on her and screech and bite. That young Blackwatch operative who always smells of smoke notices the noise and raises the alarm.  
At that point, the beans start getting ideas. Jesse McCree’s luck takes a turn for the phenomenal. Or maybe it’s Gabriel’s, it only seems to happen when they’re on missions together, but since that’s most of the time, it’s not like he’d notice the different. Enemies trip. They startle. Their weapons malfunction. At just the wrong (right) moment. Until the day it’s him tripping at just the right moment to avoid a bullet, and this weird little black and white ball screeches at him to “up up up up kill kill”. And the little things stick around. In the mind of the beans, the smoke man is now officially part of the Gabriel Reyes Defense Squad, and he better start pulling his weight soon, because there’s more and more agents turning against Reyes. To be fair, they’re slowly getting sniffed out and culled down by something that looks like sheer bloody bad luck, and they’re starting to panic.

“Did you notice we have a rat problem?” Ana had asked Jack, offhand but with this strange emphasis on the word, in front of the mess’s watery mashed potato. Jack is not sure what his face did then, but Ana had smiled and never mentioned it ever again. Jack is, understandably, concerned. He’s also hearing mentions of luck too bad to be natural from Gabriel, and Gabriel, Gabriel is also acting very shady, lately. Not hiding-something shady, more like... wary, maybe? Distrustful. Like he’s waiting, just waiting for the ceiling to fall down on top of his head. Jack is definitely worried. He starts looking into it himself, instead of letting the relevant authorities do their job. It seems like those authorities have not been doing enough, from what he finds. He fears, they might not have been doing anything at all. He looks further.  
And then he finds this little black beanbag thing in the archives, squeaking something that sounds suspiciously like his name, “Jack, Jack, Jack”, and leading him to this cache of… are those medical notes? The beanbag seems to like him, it doesn’t even try to move when he scoops it up and brings it to Angela, though it does try to hide inside his jacket.

Angela takes one look at the notes and knows. She still runs tests on the strange little creature, but it only confirms what Jack suspected, just didn’t say outloud. This is Moira O’Deorain’s work. The creature is made of nanobots, and it’s remarkably intelligent. Its vocabulary sounds rather limited, but that might simply be because it doesn’t like her. The “die, die, die” is rather telling.  
Halfway through the tests, Jack startles and mutters something about “rats” before storming out. He comes back with Ana, who immediately starts cooing at the creature. It coos right back, and, look at that, its vocabulary does indeed expand further than monosyllabic death threats. Then, even more cooing erupts from within her clothes, and Angela discovers that there are three types of “rats” in Zurich. The human kind, the nanobot kind, and the rodent one. Weirdly, the first seems to be an endangered species, while the second multiplies by the day (like tribbles, her mind supplies) and the third hasn’t been sighted in years.

This is how Gabriel finally becomes aware of his most loyal allies: he doesn’t, until Jack, Ana, Angela and McCree corner him about it, all together, on his smoke break. It feels a little too much like an interrogation for his taste, but then he gets distracted by the smoke balls, and suddenly he doesn’t really care anymore. It goes like this:  
McCree finally notices that the reaperbeans are strangely protective of Gabriel. It took him a while, because at first, he though they were afraid of him. After all, they always disappear whenever he’s near, that was a logical conclusion. But once he notices, he starts watching, until he sees one of them form from Gabriel’s shadow right in front of his eyes. He’s not confronting Reyes about this, no way. But if he mentions the balls to Ana, who then proceeds to pull one out of her pocket and ask him, looking him right in the eye with the most shit-eating grin he’s ever seen on her face, “oh, like this?”, well. At least now he knows he’s not having hallucinations from one knock to the head too many.  
Ana is very interested to learn about the actions of the Gabriel Reyes Protection Squad. She’s very, very interested in hearing more about this quiet sabotage war that’s been going on in Blackwatch and spilling over into Overwatch, and even their allies from time to time. She knows that Jack, who’s been muttering about rats at the bottom and corruption at the top for a while now, will be even more interested in what Jesse has to say.  
Jack is, indeed, very interested. The full debriefing takes forever, but they all come out of it feeling a little less bleak about the future. For all that the beans’ operations have been simplistic in their planning and execution, they have achieved their desired outcomes: mitigate the damage, stop the spread, quietly but surely cut it at the quick and slowly upend the hornest’s nest so that Jack, in the end, doesn’t have to worry much about the bottom, only the top. Which is good, because that’s his prerogative.  
Angela, however, is more interested in the shadow part. The, Gabriel Reyes’ shadow, part. She goes back to her tests, and Moira’s notes, and thinks. She’s the one who convinces them to start with that, once they decide to corner Gabriel somewhere the cameras don’t reach quite well enough to read lips. She’s the one who convinces him, ultimately, to come clean about Moira’s experiments and the hallucinations he’s been having. The death threats. The sabotage he’s not sure is against or from Blackwatch, or some weird mixture of both at once and twice over.  
Overwatch (and Blackwatch) still get disbanded, because once you expose the corruption at the top, the whole thing falls apart, if only from lack of trust. Instead, they monitor its fall. The investigations, the trials, the relocation of assets. Talon’s reaction. That’s the next step, disbanding Talon. And, if another crisis ever comes up, well. They’re only a call away.

The end.


End file.
